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My parents fled the German holocaust and arrived in the United States from Vienna in 1938. I was born in Cincinnati in 1940. I went to public schools and then to the University of Miami (Florida). I was not a stellar student. I spent my junior year of college at the Free University of Berlin. I served two years (1962-64) in the U.S. Army, most of which time I was the signal officer for air defense missile units in Germany.
After the army, I went to graduate school at the University of Cincinnati and then at the University of Pittsburgh. I received a masters degree in 1967 and a PhD in German literature in 1969. The same year I began what was to be an abbreviated career as a professor of German at Dickinson College, a small liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. During eight years as a professor, I spent a year’s sabbatical leave in Vienna, writing a book-length study on the Austrian writer Franz Werfel. It was never published.
In 1978 when my wife got a job teaching political science at the University of Georgia, I quit teaching. We moved to Georgia and I began pursuing a career as a painter and freelance cartoonist. I sold my first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1980 and since then I have had about 250 cartoons published in that magazine. I moved to Washington, DC, in 1982. In 1984 the Washington Times offered me a salaried job doing daily cartoons, which I have done (six a week) ever since. I have also continue to freelance cartoon and illustration work when the opportunity presents itself.
Through the years I have painted still lifes and landscapes when time has allowed. I have had exhibitions of my paintings and cartoons in galleries in Washington (Fendrick, Susan Conway) and have been included in group shows in galleries in New York (Semaphore, Allan Stone, Frumkin). I was divorced in 1985 and married again in 1991. I began writing my first novel, Kristallnacht around 1990, partly, I think as a way of dealing with the illness and impending death of my father. I stopped writing after about 100 pages. In late 1994 after my father’s death I took up the effort again and finished it rather quickly, writing the last 100 pages over a period of several days in January holed up in a cottage in France. It has never been published.
The second novel I wrote was about a murder in France. It has just been published as “A French Country Murder” by St. Martin’s Press.
My wife and I live in McLean, Virginia and spend part of each summer in France.
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